> In light of this, seems like a no-brainer no one could disagree with.
If someone shoots a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question any you further? Not very no-brainer, is it?
This is how it works in Poland and, I assume, most/all of EU and the rest of the world.
It is enough to say absolutely nothing, and request the government to prove its case.
If someone shot a person with my gun, I would invoke the fifth amendment, and ask the government to prove who did it beyond a reasonable doubt.
(EDIT: I should note that you also have a right to remain silent when questioned by the police- and since they won't know who to charge, there will likely not be a court case to call you to testify at)
5th amendment protections are much weaker for civil cases though.
You're not going to roll on whoever really did it (assuming you know), and trust your fate to a jury understanding presumption of innocence, and being convinced of "reasonable" doubt, without you saying a word in your own defense? Most people would not unless they had an iron-clad alibi, but if they did, they wouldn't be getting charged in the first place.
Now, per the judge's ruling in this case, red light tickets are actually quasi-criminal, not purely civil, so the standards of criminal law might need to be applied.
Sounds nice on paper, but unless you have an absolutely airtight alibi that's a great way to end up in jail. Oh, you were alone at home all night? Well, your neighbor is pretty sure they heard you come home unusually late, and a witness saw someone who kinda-sorta looked like you run away from the crime site, and the victim was sorta-kinda involved in your social circles, and there's video of victim bumping into you a few weeks ago in a bar and you reacting in what could be interpreted as an aggressive way - and it is your gun...
Or you could tell them who you loaned the gun to. Your choice.
And sounds like a great way to plead guilty to a lesser crime, but IANAL.
Is it appropriate to compare murder and running a red light given what you know about the civil implications of 5A?
Only in criminal contexts. In civil contexts your silence can absolutely be an adverse inference. Usually these red-light cameras are civil penalties, not criminal (fines with no points). The judge here seems to be saying that these are "quasi-criminal" because, uhh, I guess there are penalties.
It's basically "innocent until proven guilty". Red light cameras turn that assumption around since if your car gets ticketed it is assumed you are "guilty until proven innocent".
The judge in this case disagreed, because the red light infraction was not a simple civil fine but quasi-criminal, e.g. points on drivers license, possibly resulting in suspension, etc.
The structure of this whole thing is to avoid having to do an actual investigation. They could subpoena the car owner's phone records for instance. Instead they choose to hide behind bureaucracy and offer you an off ramp in the form of a lower payment to make it all go away.
Do you know you can be licensed to drive a vehicle without owning one, and similarly, own one without being licensed to drive it?
Why would the owner of the property be responsible for someone else's actions with that property?
But for the purposes of traffic tickets, yea, its ridiculous. It also has a lot of faults. I got a traffic ticket from a red light camera for a car I owned when I was stationed in California. The ticket came to me in Oregon 5 years AFTER I traded that vehicle in (I traded it in right before moving to Oregon) and the traffic cam ticket was from Texas, a state I've never driven a vehicle in. My only presence in Texas has been being in the airport in Dallas. The ticket was also for a year prior to when I received it. So I hadn't owned it in 4 years when it ran a red light in Texas.
The owner isn't responsible for the drivers actions, but they are required to name the driver. (Or declare the car stolen etc.)
(At least in much of Europe.)
As someone else said, this only works against self-incrimination? If you say it wasn't you then you need to testify or get prosecuted?
Second, you can still generally invoke the 5th amendment during testimony even if you already claimed someone else did it. You aren't under oath until said testimony, so it still protects against you having to choose between committing perjury or self-incrimination, and doing so cannot be used as evidence of either.
And you plead the 5th after going under oath. And you can't just plead the 5th to any question. If the prosection puts you under oath and asks you your name, you can't plead the 5th to that
5th amendment protections can include questions of identity, if the question of identity is relevant for incrimination. Like, if the government has a warrant for "Joe Smith", you're not required to testify whether that's you. It's usually a waste of time since could just prove it with the non-testimonial evidence that lead to your arrest, but the protection does exist.
Most camera tickets are either civil moving, or civil non-moving. Civil moving are against a person and civil non-moving are against the vehicle. Neither of which case does 5th amendment protect you from incriminating yourself, and neither of which does it require prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
The US is a very big place. And in this place, we have fifty (!) different states. That's fifty different sets of rules relating to owning and driving cars -- nearly twice as many as the EU has member nations.
A Florida judge might decide that red light camera tickets are unconstitutional, while an Arizona judge might decide that they're completely OK. These two very different rulings can co-exist, without conflict, potentially forever.
Each state doing their own thing independently of the others is just how we roll here.
A sane and rational person might reasonably conclude that this situation is literally insane -- and they may be right! -- but it is this way anyway.
(And it is this way by design.)
I don't believe the founders intended as much federal oversight as we currently have. It was supposed to be self-governing states with a few exceptions. So much of the constitution is to limit the feds.
e.g. checking your calendar/diary, looking through receipts or bank statements to work out where you likely were.
There's also a requirement that a request for information is sent within 14 days for minor incidents like speeding or red light violations, so it's not like you have to work out who was driving on a Tuesday morning three years ago.
I gave her the citation and she called the cop who issued the citation and asked him who was driving at the time. He answered that a man was driving, and she told him he issued the citation to her, a woman. Her first name is one letter away from a male first name, so I’m guessing the cop saw it and assumed it was me and not her.
He got frustrated and told her to go ahead and rip the citation up since he wrote it to the wrong driver, she told him she’d show up to court and the judge would instantly dismiss the ticket due to the officer pulling over a man and issuing the citation to a woman, so he canceled it. He didn’t want to look like a complete fool in front of a judge.
Not once did he ask who was actually driving because he knows she is never going to tell him and he can’t force her to reveal that it was me.
Note that not once did you mention that you were innocent.
Why would you presume GP was drunk?
Also, it's completely common and safe to drive slightly over the speed limit in some circumstances, and in many parts of the US it's exceedingly rare for people to drive below the speed limit as you suggest. In many places the tickets are essentially written more for not seeing the cop and slowing down than for actually doing 78 in a 65.
There really is no difference between "who drove through a red light" and "who scratched the bumper while parking" here - how do you currently solve the latter one?
Same as parking enforcement. Goes against the car, not an individual. So the financial responsibility will be assigned, but no punishment.
In short: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/19...
Sure, but they have no right to issue you a ticket without proving you broke the law. Same as in the gun case: they have every right to question you, but they can't convict you for murder based solely on evidence that it was your gun that killed the victim.
There is no such requirement.
Says who? If the car is mine, I am free to do with it whatever I like (of course, excepting criminal acts). I do not owe anybody an account of what I - or the care - did at any particular moment. If the car was used in the commission of a crime, it's up to the prosecution to prove I had something to do with it. If they think I know who did it - prove it and prosecute me under the law. You can't just prosecute because you think I should know, that's not how proper law works - otherwise every cop in the country would be 100% sure who they caught is the criminal - because why not, if it's enough for conviction, why work harder!
> If someone shoots a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question any you further?
They can question all they like, but to secure a criminal conviction, they must prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that I was the person who did it. Otherwise you get no conviction. If they strongly suspect I did it, they would find a proof - but the fact that I owned a gun is not that proof (for one, guns can be easily stolen, and frequently are).
That said, I did at times get smaller fine and less severe consequences from a speeding ticket by just pretending I am going to go to court (I didn't really want to, I wanted smaller fine :) - because policemen do not like to waste time in court either - so they would agree, that if I do not try to deny I did it, and do not force thus them to go to court and testify, they would agree to less severe violation (while still costing me $$, just not as much as it could). That's totally a thing, at least in the US. The risk, of course, if you are an ass about it and piss off the police officer, they'd say to heck with it, I'll go to court, and you'd have to go to court too, and as per above, you'd get punished more severely. So, always be polite, and it will be to your benefit.
As for automated speeding tickets, I'm not a huge fan of it. Too many cases of this system being wrong or abusive.
The arguing about having a constitutional right to drive bad boggles the mind, road deaths in the US are high, compared to civilized nations. Wikipedia states it's 14.2 deaths per 100000 inhbitants, that's between Sierra Leone (13.8) and Angola (15.0). For comparison, India has 12.6 traffic deaths per 100000 citizens and the worst country in Europe is Greece at 6.1.
The right metric is death per citizen, not per mile, because it's about the number of people who have lost a family member or friend.
When you get around exclusively on two wheels (motorcycle and bicycle) bad drivers are a direct safety threat. Even cagers ought to be careful about being permissive with red light running, side-on crashes are remarkably deadly for the one who got hit in the door because there is not much structural protection or space on the side of the vehicle.
For speeding there's a website where you can view photos and a certificate showing the equipment was calibrated recently, and you can admit or nominate another driver (or you can do it via paper forms)
Why? IMHO, I shouldn't have to. It's the police's job to make sure they have the right person.
That's not necessarily true. What if it's a shared car in your family and you weren't home to see who took it?
This comment is the tech equivalent to "falsehoods programmers believe about <thing>"... real life does not fit into such neat boxes.
I'm not arguing it isn't, but the thought exercise is: does it make sense for the government to take people's money if the accused can't prove it wasn't them driving the car based on a police accusation (also with the threat of jail time if you don't pay)?
I don't think that's "normal", personally.
I don't have to prove who was driving. I don't have to prove I wasn't the one driving. The state has to prove that I was the one driving.
>If someone shoots a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question any you further?
I don't expect them not to question me further and that's not what this is about. This is about whether your car running a red light is proof, in and of itself absent any other facts, that you ran a red light in your car.
>This is how it works in Poland
This is not how it works in the US
>I assume, most/all of EU and the rest of the world.
You assume incorrectly
But also traffic cameras here generally take frontal pictures, so typically the only way you can get away with claiming it wasn't you is if they are very lazy / not interested in investigating further.
Why? Americans liberated themselves from this kind of relationship with the government hundreds of years ago.
Running a red light is not remotely equivalent to shooting someone with a gun, get a grip
Why shouldn't we?
Unlike the US, the EU is a collection of fully sovereign countries.
As usual, Europe doesn't care about internal consistency when it comes to rights. They just legislate (or rule) whatever 'works' for the current definition of 'works'.
> If someone shot a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question you further? Not very no-brainer, is it?
Nobody has said you can't be questioned.
Sure. And you advocate that in exchange in US you get havoc on the roads because anyone can say "it wasn't me speeding 50 miles over the limit, bite me"? Is that the freedom you want?
It's literally not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
> Belgium 7.3
> Slovenia 7.0
> US 6.9
> France 5.8
Never mind all the other countries that do have presumption of guilt, which are also comparable in per-mile road deaths.
And the ones with presumption but which _are_ 10x worse.
Allowing the presumption is very clearly not well-correlated with safety.
You are also conveniently leaving it the per-capita figures, with US being at 14.2 per 100k while countries like Norway, Sweden, and Finland being at 2.x, and Europe as a while being at 6.7.
So sure, "10x more" might be an exaggeration, but "2x more" is fairly accurate and even a claim of "7x more" is arguable.
I used this statistic because yours is like saying the US is richer than Switzerland, if you don't divide by the number of people. Pretty irrelevant.
There is no point comparing a country that drives everywhere with a country that doesn't using a metric that doesn't account for this difference.
Unless the argument is that driving everywhere is a stupid and irresponsible way to operate a society.
Europe is a nonsense in this regard: you have rights, except all the special cases when you don't. You have a right to free speech, except for all the ways in which you don't. You have the right to silence, except when you don't.
Which is also true in the US, after all they restrict obscenity as a form of speech. It's just that they have much fewer exceptions.
However, I agree with Florida on this; the onus should be not be on the accused to prove innocence after a citation is issued. Feels like a 'call us to unsubscribe' time-wasting dark pattern.
That said, if merely being the owner of a tool is sufficient to be guilty of whatever infraction someone else performs with said tool, that has 2 problems beyond the whole "proving your innocence" debate:
1. Why stop climbing up the chain at the current owner when you could keep climbing and say it's all the fault of the manufacturer? I jest, but this illustrates why, despite my first paragraph, it's indeed only sensible that the driver be at fault, so the government must prove who was driving.
2. Why treat cars differently from, say, weapons?
In the same way, if your car fails emissions tests, you can’t register it and it’s the responsibility of the owner to ensure that their car meets emissions standards.
Some other thoughts: An illegally parked car can be fined, impounded, booted. Car with outstanding parking tickets can also have all of the above. But typically the driver wouldn't see points or a moving violation for any of these offenses. For example: NYC you can get blocking the box tickets written by parking enforcement but they don't carry the weight of a moving violation like a police officer's ticket would. (and if you don't pay it, it's not the driving privilege that's suspended in the state, it's the car itself that would be targeted for booting/impounding, etc)
Yeah that's what they said when ICE was unilaterally kicking in doors.
The way I see it anything that would prompt the government to use violence upon you without you taking action to escalate deserves the same level of protection for the accused as a "real" criminal matter.
Yes I'm aware this includes just about everything beyond library late fines and would break the system at least for awhile. Worth it. The government shouldn't be able to assess the same penalties (fines) and threaten the same enforcement actions (forfeiture of property, arrest for nonpayment, etc, etc) as they do in criminal matters and side step people's rights simply because they say it's civil. The rights and procedural protections are what they are not to prevent the application of a label, but to prevent abuse at the hands of the government.
Civil offenses are not.
---
Mild speeding, no seatbelt, broken taillight are civil.
DUIs, reckless driving, hit-and-run are criminal.
All vehicular offenses, but different punishments.
---
Unauthorized immigration to the US is NOT punishable by incarceration. (It can result in deportation to the nation of origin.)
And what happens if you don't pay civil (or criminal) fines? A bench warrant gets issued and you get arrested. And if you get a contempt charge in all this guess where you can go?
The only "real difference" between a criminal offense where they "can" jail you but usually just fine you is procedural.
I would rather catch a bullshit DUI than have a local building commissioner coming after me for some violation. They're both $10k problems, but with one of them you have "real rights"
>Unauthorized immigration to the US is NOT punishable by incarceration.
The problem wasn't what the statutory punishment is or isn't.
The problem was the unilateral nature of it. Hence all the hoopla over warrant types, sloppy behavior, etc.
Shift the problem onto individuals, make it a burden for the public. Typical HN attitude
It is commonplace to drive, but has high potential for danger and death. It seems ok to me to have a level of care required for owning a vehicle, and that includes being mindful of who you share your vehicle with.
Same thing with guns - if you blindly lend a gun to an acquaintance and they shoot a school, you will absolutely be charged with some crimes, either accessory to murder or manslaughter, where you have to prove that you weren’t being negligent by giving it to them. Guns are dangerous and owning them bears a higher level of responsibility to the owner.
Vehicles kill more people, they also deserve responsibility to own. If somebody breaks laws with your vehicle, it’s your responsibility by default unless you prove otherwise.
It doesn’t seem that different to extend this to camera tickets.
Using this line of thinking, it will be a short time until you’re responsible for what a criminal does with your stolen vehicle; after all, you failed to secure it.
I hope you get exactly what you’re asking for, and all the implications thereof (but in a state far from me). I feel certain you won’t enjoy it.
And yes, very likely some people would abuse it to get out of traffic tickets. I'd rather have that than constitutional due process protections eroded. We're not doing super-great on that anyway, we don't need to do worse, and if some scoundrel occasionally not paying traffic ticket is a price we have to pay to avoid that, I am fine with it.
> In the order, the court found that red-light camera cases, although labeled as civil infractions, function as “quasi-criminal” proceedings because they can result in monetary penalties, a formal finding of guilt, and consequences tied to a driver’s record.
Which seems to just relabel any fine from the government as a criminal matter?
IMO when you register the vehicle for the right to drive on public roads, you are entering into an agreement that you will be responsible for following the rules of the road, and for lending the car to people who also do so.
Similarly, if I register a firearm legally, and then lend it out to anyone who asks, regardless of whether they follow the law, I don’t think it would be crazy to hold me financially responsible if a shooting happens with my gun.
States have had to write laws for this to be a criminal matter. Before then it was a civil matter, but it was individuals against individuals and not state against individuals.
>Which seems to just relabel any fine from the government as a criminal matter?
It wasn't exactly about the fine, but points on a license I believe.
Probably a lot of other issues arise from that. If your car gets towed for being illegally parked, what if you just say you didn't park it there? Seems like a similar violation to a red light ticket.
[1]:https://caticketking.com/help-center/photo-red-light-help/ph...
Still, seems to me that it is reasonable to prove who did such violation. Maybe photo could identify person. Or maybe other data could be requested like phone location data. Doesn't seem unreasonable or high hurdle. Probably not cost effective in every case.
"Preponderance of the Evidence" which is probably used for traffic cases means only "more likely than not" (or about 51% certainty).
For one, that was Florida. In California there's the "Permissive Use" rule which means you are at least partially responsible for who you lend your car to. If they get in an accident, you can be held partially liable.
There's also "Negligent Entrustment" if it can be proved you knowingly loaned your car or gun to someone intoxicated, unlicensed, etc...
Businesses are generally supposed to take responsibility for their employees. That might sound obvious if the business is FAANG but it's far less obvious to a single person coffee-shop or flower stand who hires their first employee who then spills hot coffee on a customer.
Parents are liable for their kids on many (most?) cases
I think another is where a someone goes to bar, drinks too much, the bartender gets charged.
Rather than just fight the cameras, what solution would you suggest? Just saying "more officer enforcement" doesn't seem valid as budgets are shrinking, applicants are shrinking, and people are dying from reckless drivers.
Which is better than the HN title.
I disagree completely. This is how speed and red light cameras operate in my country. If you weren't the one driving, it's straight forward to show that. The other party can admit to the offence or you can present evidence including the camera itself. The burden is low. Camera infractions do not carry license demerit points because of this ongerent uncertainty.
What's the alternative? Use even more valuable police resources to issue these tickets? Or just not penalize dangerous infractions?
Perhaps needing to show these are dangerous infractions should come first?
These US states considered them moving infractions with points. Now the state must adjust by removing points or doing its due diligence.